So... Dungeon healers is done for?

[Wyndam]

You could sync them harder, yes. That's what they did with the Dead Ends for Endwalker and it helped keep the narrative flow of the dungeon intact. Certain pulls, specifically near the beginning and the end, I was seeing groups wipe even to the end of EW. It took me forever to farm that starbird! I think a tighter sync would be an unsatisfying solution because then you'd get even less opportunity to use the gear you worked so hard to earn. I already feel like I barely get to play at my native item level and I'm item level synced in most content that isn't Savage. I thought Criterion was a great idea that ultimately failed because it was poorly supported with bad rewards. It really needed something more tangible to give it an incentive. Otherwise I'd be supporting that idea where the tuning is just tighter in general. Cloud of Darkness got gear attached to it and hey, people seemed to actually do it.

If we were to nerf the crafted gear down 10 item levels it would lower the performance floor a little when people are playing alt jobs and make things a little harder on average. It would also make EX and normal raid gear more relevant, possibly allowing select pieces of BiS to roll over from the end of one Savage tier to another. We would still have the problem where late in the patch cycle people overpower stuff but I'm okay with that. I think the game needs to let people feel powerful at some point.

[Supersnow845]

Maybe 6 is a bit shallow but I think 30 is too deep. Like right now BIS is 760. In OC gear is 700 and occult special effect at all +2 gives you 600 extra main stat and about 15% more damage on phantom actions (plus 24% from mastery stacks) and with that gear in 700 content you are basically doing the damage a person in 760 does outside of OC

600 main stat is an entire extra piece of left side gear (current chest piece gives you like 540 main stat). So every 2 tiers we are basically gaining an entire extra piece of left side gear. It’s just moving too fast

[Carighan]

600 main stat is an entire extra piece of left side gear (current chest piece gives you like 540 main stat). So every 2 tiers we are basically gaining an entire extra piece of left side gear. It’s just moving too fast

That's an interesting point I had not considered, but I agree then. I mean to a degree it makes sense, a full 700->760 upgrade is roughly 700-ish total itemlevel gained over all pieces, so it makes sense that I gain about as much stats as a whole extra item. But you are right of course in that this feels like too much, and it's also an issue because 760 is not the end. I would assume this whole "one extra item worth of stats" could be the entire expansion, comparing the lowest proper obtained sets to the highest ones, that'd be okay. But it should never be more than that, really.

And then if that "squish" would be propagated downwards through all old levels and expansions, we'd see a significant total drop in the power curve (and a number squish like hell in general, we'd probably be sitting at 240-300ish ilvl right now instead of 760), but there'd still be a neat progression. Still, I think like in WoW, it'd be wildly unpopular because it "feels bad".

[Carighan]

More so because plenty MMORPGs get away with hybrid jobs genuinely being weaker at each hybrid aspect in return for having two.

But importantly those games (early EQ1, GW2, such stuff) are built around the classes being that way. Pure healers cannot be useful if not enough damage is ever dealt to even engage one pure healer. Naturally the existence of proper hybrid healers who can do healing + X (like current healers being all hybrid healers who do DPS+Healing!) displaces the idea of a pure healer (who spends ~all time on healing) because there is never enough healing need for even two hybrid healers, nevermind a single pure one.

And the same applies to other concepts. We need the battle system to change to meaningfully change combat classes.